Internet Explorer 8: blessing or curse?
14 March 2009
by
Gunthy
Filed under
Software + Windows
Whether you like it or not, the final release of Microsoft’s newest browser, Internet Explorer 8, is coming closer and closer. While this latest version of IE has been giving quite some attention around the Web, with both the lovers and the haters elaborately venting their opinions, I thought it was time for me to take a little look on how things are going. IE8 promises to bring both better security and more standards complaint handling of all sorts of web-code. Of course one can only applaud such initiatives, but is it true?
On the security side it’s probably a bit early to tell. It’s clear that Microsoft has plenty of experience creating relative insecure browsers and hopefully they have learned from earlier mistakes. Of course you have to look at this in perspective. IE still is the one with the biggest market share, so it only makes sense that more security issues and bugs are found faster. This in turn is also the main reason the browser is targeted the most by malware authors. On the other hand, being the leading software in your field, my opinion is that security should be top priority. I’m not saying it isn’t over at Redmond, but we can all agree it doesn’t always look that way. Surely problems will arise sooner or later, whether IE8 will live up to it’s expectation here, I guess only time will tell.
So what about the standards side? I for one can only be happy with the fact that finally Microsoft has decided to be more standards-compliant. This is definitely a step in the right direction. But let’s take a closer look… Over at the IE blog, there’s an interesting post about backwards-compatibility. To ensure that old(er) sites work seamlessly with this new version, IE8 is getting shipped with what is called Compatibility View. This mode is there to make sure IE7 code still runs on IE8, even if it’s not really adhering to the standards. And I think here is where the problems start. If you browse down on the blog-post to the comments, you can see a lot of people are concerned about this. In essence IE8 is providing 2 new ways of rendering pages. One of course using the native IE8 mode, using the provided standards, the other one implementing sometimes strange behaviour in handling code. This is surely going to cause quite some headaches with developers.
Last but not least, I’d like to share some Microsoft marketing trick I found lining out the different loading times of IE8, Firefox and Chrome. Personally I found the video quite funny, but what scares me is that a lot of end-users will walk right into this. I’m not saying the claims made are wrong or twisted, but I do wonder if people really think speed is THAT important. Let’s be honest here, who really cares if a site takes one of half a second longer to load in your browser of choice. Differences like this are really marginal. What should matter most is the overall performance of the application, on all domains. Such a campaign proves one thing for me: Microsoft is really feeling the heat from Firefox and Chrome breathing down it’s neck. They are afraid, and they should be!
